Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (10 page)

Before I had time to reply he had broken the connection.

The young doctor had slipped away while I was on the telephone. Now he came back. He said, ‘I'm afraid, Mr Jones, there has to be an operation – an immediate one. There are a lot of out-patients in the waiting room, but there's an empty room on the second floor where you could rest undisturbed. I'll come and see you immediately the operation is over.'

When he opened the door of the empty room I recognized it, or I thought I did, as the room where Mr Steiner had lain, but hospital rooms all look the same, like sleeping tablets. The window was open and the clang and clatter of the autoroute came in.

‘Shall I close the window?' the young doctor asked. From his solicitude you would have thought I was the patient.

‘No, no, don't bother. I'd rather have the air.' But it was the noise I wanted. It is only when one is happy or undisturbed that one can bear silence.

‘If there is anything you want just ring,' and he showed me the bell beside the bed. There was a thermos for iced water on the table and he checked to see whether it was full. ‘I'll be back soon,' he said. ‘Try not to worry. We have had many worse cases.'

There was an armchair for visitors and I sat in it and I wished that Mr Steiner lay in the bed for me to talk to. I would even have welcomed the old man who couldn't speak or hear. Some words of Mr Steiner came back to my mind. He had said of Anna-Luise's mother: ‘I used to look in other women's faces for years after she died and then I gave it up.' The awful thing in that statement was ‘for years'. Years, I thought, years . . . can one go on for years? Every few minutes I looked at my watch . . . two minutes gone, three minutes gone, once I was lucky and four and a half minutes passed. I thought: Shall I be doing this until I die?

There was a knock on the door and the young doctor entered. He looked shy and embarrassed and a wild hope came to me: they had made a gaffe and the injury wasn't serious after all. He said, ‘I'm sorry. I'm afraid. . .' Then the words came out in a rush. ‘We hadn't much hope. She didn't suffer at all. She died under the anaesthetic.'

‘Died?'

‘Yes.'

All I could find to say was, ‘Oh.'

He asked, ‘Would you like to see her?'

‘No.'

‘Shall we get you a taxi? Perhaps you wouldn't mind coming to the hospital tomorrow. To see the registrar. There are papers which have to be signed. Such a lot of paper work always.'

I said, ‘I'd rather finish with all that now. If it's the same to you.'

14

I sent to Doctor Fischer the letter that he required. I wrote the dry facts of his daughter's death and I told him when and where she was to be buried. It was not the hay fever season so that I could expect no tears, but I thought he might possibly turn up. He didn't and there was no one to watch her being put into the ground, except the Anglican padre, our twice-weekly maid and myself. I had her buried in Saint Martin's cemetery in Gibraltan ground (in Switzerland the Anglican Church belongs to the diocese of Gibraltar) because she had to be put somewhere. I had no idea what religious faith Doctor Fischer would have claimed to hold or her mother – or in what church Anna-Luise had been baptized – we had not had sufficient time together to learn such unimportant details about one another. As an Englishman it seemed the easiest thing to bury her according to English rites, since nobody so far as I know has established agnostic cemeteries. Most Swiss in the Canton of Geneva are Protestant, and her mother had probably been buried in a Protestant cemetery, but Swiss Protestants believe seriously in their religion – the Anglican Church, with all its contradictory beliefs, seemed closer to our agnostic views. In the cemetery I half expected Monsieur Belmont to appear discreetly in the background as he had appeared at our wedding and again at the midnight Mass, but to my relief he wasn't there. So there was no one I had to speak to. I was alone, I could go back alone to our flat, it was the next best thing to being with her.

What to do when I was there I had decided beforehand. I had read many years ago in a detective story how it was possible to kill oneself by drinking a half pint of spirits in a single draught. As I remembered the story, one character challenged the other to drink what was apparently called a sconce (the writer was Oxford educated). I thought it I would make certain by dissolving in the whisky twenty tablets of aspirin which was all I had. Then I made myself comfortable in the easy chair in which Anna-Luise used to sit and put the glass on the table beside me. I felt at peace and an odd sense of near-happiness moved in me. It seemed to me that I could spend hours, even days, like that, just watching the elixir of death in the glass. A few grains of the aspirin settled to the bottom of the glass and I stirred them with my finger until they dissolved. As long as the glass was there I felt safe from loneliness, even from grief. It was like the interim of relief between two periods of pain, and I could prolong this interim at will.

Then the telephone rang. I let it ring for a while, but it disturbed the peace of the room like a neighbour's dog. I got up and went into the hall. As I lifted the receiver I looked back at the glass for reassurance, that promise of no long future. A woman's voice said, ‘Mr Jones. It is Mr Jones, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is Mrs Montgomery.' So the Toads had caught up with me after all.

‘Are you still there, Mr Jones?'

‘Yes.'

‘I wanted to say . . . we've only just heard . . . how sorry we all are . . .'

‘Thank you,' I said and rang off, but before I could get back to my chair, the telephone sounded again. Reluctantly I returned.

‘Yes?' I said. I wondered which one it would be this time, but it was still Mrs Montgomery. How long it takes such women to say good-bye even on the telephone.

‘Mr Jones, you didn't give me time to speak. I have a message for you from Doctor Fischer. He wants to see you.'

‘He could have seen me if he had come to his daughter's funeral.'

‘Oh, but there were reasons . . . You mustn't blame him . . . He will explain to you . . . He wants you to go and see him tomorrow . . . Any time in the afternoon . . .'

‘Why can't he telephone himself?'

‘He very much dislikes the telephone. He always uses Albert . . . or one of us if we are around.'

‘Then why doesn't he write?'

‘Mr Kips is away at the moment.'

‘Does Mr Kips have to write his letters?'

‘His business letters, yes.'

‘I have no business with Doctor Fischer.'

‘Something to do with a trust, I think. You will go, won't you?'

‘Tell him,' I said, ‘tell him . . . I will consider it.'

I rang off. At least that would keep him guessing all the next afternoon, for I had no intention of going. All I wanted was to return to my chair and the half-pint glass of neat whisky: a little sediment of aspirin had formed again, and I stirred this with my finger, but the sense of happiness had gone. I wasn't alone any more. Doctor Fischer seemed to permeate the room like smoke. There was one way to get rid of him and I drained the glass without drawing breath.

I had expected, judging from the detective story, that the heart would stop as suddenly as a clock, but I found I was still alive. I think now that the aspirin had been a mistake – two poisons can counteract each other. I should have trusted the detective novelist: such people are said to research carefully when it comes to medical details, and then, if I remember aright, the character who drank the sconce was already half drunk while I was dead sober. So it is that we often bungle our own deaths.

I wasn't, for a moment, even sleepy. I felt more than usually clear-headed as one does when a little drunk, and in my temporary clarity I thought: trust, trust, and the reason for Doctor Fischer's message suddenly came to me. Anna-Luise's money from her mother, I remembered, was held in some kind of a trust: she had received the income only. I had no idea to whom the capital would belong now, and I thought with hatred: He doesn't come to her funeral, but he's already thinking of the financial consequences. Perhaps he gets the money – the blood money. I remembered her white Christmas sweater stained with blood. He was as greedy as the Toads, I thought. He was a Toad himself – the King Toad of them all. Then suddenly, in the way that I had pictured death would come, I was struck down by sleep.

15

When I woke I thought that perhaps I had been asleep for an hour or two. My head was quite clear, but when I looked at my watch, the hands seemed to have mysteriously retreated. I looked out of the window, but the grey snow sky gave nothing away – it looked much as it had looked before I slept. A morning sky, an evening sky, take your pick. It was quite a while before I realized I had slept for more than eighteen hours, and then it was the chair I sat in and the empty glass which brought back to me the fact that Anna-Luise was dead. The glass was like an emptied revolver or a knife that had been broken uselessly on the bone of the chest. I had to begin to find another way to die.

Then I remembered the telephone call and Doctor Fischer's concern with the trust. I was a man sick with grief and surely a sick man can be forgiven his sick thoughts. I wanted to humiliate Fischer who had killed Anna-Luise's mother and ruined Steiner. I wanted to prick his pride. I wanted him to suffer as I was suffering. I would go and see him as he asked.

I borrowed a car from my garage and drove to Versoix. I realized my head was not so clear as I had believed. On the autoroute I nearly crashed into the back of a lorry turning into one of the exits, and it occurred to me that this could have been as good a death as the whisky – but then perhaps it would have failed me more completely. I might have been dragged out of the wreck a cripple unable afterwards to compass my own destruction. I drove more carefully from then on, but my thoughts still wandered – to the distant spot of red which I had watched as it mounted on the ski-lift towards the
piste rouge
, to the all-red sweater on the stretcher, and the bandages I had taken for the white hair of a stranger. I nearly missed the exit to Versoix.

The great white house stood above the lake like a Pharaoh's tomb. It dwarfed my car, and the bell seemed to tinkle absurdly in the depths of the enormous grave. Albert opened the door. For some reason he was dressed in black. Had Doctor Fischer put his servant into mourning in his place? The black suit seemed to have changed his character for the better. He made no show of not recognizing me. He didn't sneer at me, but led the way promptly up the great marble staircase.

Doctor Fischer was not in mourning. He sat as he had done at our first meeting behind his desk (it was almost bare except for one large, obviously expensive Christmas cracker, shiny in scarlet and gold) and he said as before, ‘Sit down, Jones.' Then there was a long silence. For once it seemed that he was at a loss for words. I looked at the cracker and he picked it up and put it down again and the silence went on and on, so it was I who eventually spoke. I accused him. ‘You didn't come to your daughter's funeral.'

He said, ‘She had too much of her mother in her.' He added, ‘She even looked like her, when she grew up.'

‘That was what Mr Steiner said.'

‘Steiner?'

‘Steiner.'

‘So! Is that little man still living?'

‘Yes. At least he was a few weeks ago.'

‘A bug is difficult to finish,' he said. ‘They get back into the woodwork where your fingernail won't reach.'

‘Your daughter never did you any harm.'

‘She was like her mother. In character as much as in face. She would have harmed you in the same way given the time. I wonder what sort of Steiner would have come out of the woodwork in your case. Perhaps the garbage man. They like to humiliate.'

‘Is that what you brought me here to say?'

‘Not all, but a little part of it, yes. I have been thinking ever since the last party that I owe you something, Jones, and I'm not in the habit of running up debts. You behaved better than the others.'

‘The Toads you mean?'

‘Toads?'

‘That was your daughter's name for your friends.'

‘I have no friends,' he said in the words of his servant Albert. He added, ‘These people are acquaintances. One can't avoid acquaintances. You mustn't think I dislike such people. I don't dislike them. One dislikes one's equals. I despise them.'

‘Like I despise you?'

‘Oh, but you don't, Jones, you don't. You are not speaking accurately. You don't despise me. You hate me or think you do.'

‘I know I do.'

He gave at that assurance the little smile which Anna-Luise had told me was dangerous. It was a smile of infinite indifference. It was the kind of smile which I could imagine a sculptor temerariously and heretically carving on the inexpressive armour-plated face of Buddha. ‘So Jones hates me,' he said, ‘that is an honour indeed. You and I expect Steiner. And in a way for the same reason. My wife in one case, my daughter in the other.'

‘You never forgive, do you, even the dead?'

‘Oh, forgiveness, Jones. That's a Christian term. Are you a Christian, Jones?'

‘I don't know. I only know I've never despised anyone as I despise you.'

‘Again you are using the wrong term. Semantics are important, Jones. I tell you, you hate, you don't despise. To despise comes out of a great disappointment. Most people are not capable of a great disappointment, and I doubt if you are. Their expectations are too low for that. When one despises, Jones, it's like a deep and incurable wound, the beginning of death. And one must revenge one's wound while there's still time. When the one who inflicted it is dead, one has to strike back at others. Perhaps, if I believed in God, I would want to take my revenge on him for having made me capable of disappointment. I wonder by the way – it's a philosophical question – how one would revenge oneself on God. I suppose Christians would say by hurting his son.'